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Redwood trees belong in California. What would
you make of the discovery of a stand of six redwood
trees in an east coast forest surrounded by the
expected indigenous deciduous oaks, maples, elms,
and the odd birch thrown in for bio diversity? The
following relates to my experience in front of some
of my favorite paintings in the Museum of Modern
Art.
Just like you, when I look at an artwork, I come
with my own baggage. What I've seen previously,
what I know from school and my experience of working
in museums, relationships with similar artworks,
all come into play. Connections in many forms tumble
out of my suitcase right in front of the artwork
and within view of any museum guard who happens
to be standing nearby. The same unpacking of personal
baggage doesn't transpire when I look at illustrations
of paintings in books. There you just turn the page
and poof, what was visible before is covered with
another page. Same thing with postcards, flip them
over to read the message. Illustrations have no
significant physical or emotive presence; they are
at best small scale reminders, stand-ins, or shadows
that act as reference for the real object.
Communicating with an artwork requires being physically
face to face with the work of art. A reproduction
won't do. This can only happen in a place where
artworks reside; a museum, gallery, studio, church,
or collection. Viewing art today is seen too much
as public entertainment, even as spectacle, as a
blockbuster cultural event. But each art object
is imbued by their creator with intentions not limited
to entertainment value: it was made by a single
soul to reach us each individually. That's a tough
job from either side. The artist has produced the
work, almost always in the solitary, contemplative,
environment of the studio; a place where one is
alone to study. Once the work is out of the hands
of the maker, it requires a recipient to complete
its purpose.
Art demands, needs your attention, to complete
the task of creation started in the studio. It's
as if the painter picked up a telephone and dialed
the future. Who will answer the phone, assuming
anyone can hear the ringing? If you pick up the
receiver, what do you do about the person standing
next to you asking who the phone is for? This is
part of the problem in crowed museums, very little
space is allowed for proper contemplation. Hey,
could you turn down the noise, someone is trying
to concentrate?!
No experience may seem needed to look upon an artwork.
Sorry, contemplation is required. Ok, walk right
on by, tune out, be distracted by other people or
answer the phone. Looking at an artwork is a lot
like looking at a telephone. The key is to listen
to it ring to your eyes, then answer it.
Art has no size requirement; a tiny intimate work
can have a commanding presence, as seductive as
a whisper in your ear at the right time. A large
scale piece might be assumed to bellow, shout, and
command from sheer size, and then again it might
not. Each unique painting has something to interact
with, to respond to. An illustration or post card
reproduction of an artwork functions with the same
effectiveness as an illustration of a telephone.
Go ahead and answer the phone, it's a call from
the past.
What follows speaks to experience that could never
be gained from a photograph of an artwork, anymore
than a redwood tree in an eastern forest might be
spotted in a LandSat image taken from space. It
is possible, but not likely.
October weather can be bright and crisp in New
York. It can also be very nasty, stormy with a premature
taste of winter or just plain grumpy about no longer
being summer. This was a shiny apple day. It was
red delicious.
This was a day to be outside, to go to the park
or walk around the streets. Weather this beautiful
is meant to be celebrated. This was a day to sit
in an outdoor café, maybe even sample the
fare of the street vendors. Leave the taxi, bus,
and subway for another day. Instead, walk and walk
and walk. When the weather is this beautiful it
is perfect museum time for me. Not that I don't
love wonderful sunlit days, I do, but a day like
this empties the museums, beckoning crowds to enjoy
the out of doors, leaving me the museums, almost
to myself. This gives me time and space to spend
with my old friends; Matisse, Gauguin, Cezanne,
Picasso, and Pollock.
I take the time to pick up the invisible telephone
calls of my own choice. I am in one of those all-you-can-eat
restaurants that don't exist except in your dreams,
where every calorie has been negated and each mouthful
is the best you've ever rolled over your tongue.
But time ticks away and there is not enough room
in your belly to take it all in. You have to make
choices. In my dreams I head to the dessert first.
In the Museum of Modern Art I head to see Matisse.
Matisse schools me on methods of refinement, while
I sit and listen with my eyes. Matisse marks the
path he has taken to make each painting. His adjustments
are all there, really. Rarely does he cover his
tracks, if I can't see the tracks I might not be
looking closely enough. His corrections are lessons
not only in painting and drawing, but in living.
He whispers over my ghost telephone that there is
great joy in life if we will work to find it. With
Matisse beauty is in the details. Any other artist
might lay down line, color and be done. Matisse
digests his own work, savors it, then returns later,
makes adjustments, and leaves evidence of his modification.
He does this in his paintings and more so in his
collages. It is enlightening to sit in front of
the big collages and see how he has snipped a piece
here and added a hunk of paper there; adjusting
and tweaking. That's what I look forward to most
when I visit a museum and a Matisse pops into view
across a room; what will be revealed this time?
Imagine if William Shakespeare polished his prose,
but included the scribbled deletions or overwrote
creating a palimpsest, so you really saw how his
brain worked; then offered it as the finished play?
Finding an early script or scribbled notes wouldn't
be the same as what Matisse sets in front of us.
Besides, to do this in written form would be very
confusing. But, the way Matisse handles it, painting
actually becomes less confusing. It isn't a question
of ironing out wrinkles or applying cosmetics to
warts. It unveils a history of a journey taken,
suggesting that the key to the treasure is the treasure.
Few artists are such prolific teachers. Pablo Picasso
gives us entirely different things to consider,
sure, but once he tells us he moves on, if he revisits
the idea it is on a fresh rectangle of paper or
canvas.
I watched a film which showed Claes Oldenburg working
on a series of drawings. His procedure was to work
on several pieces at the same time, to lay down
his design on paper, one sheet at a time, then to
walk away and do something else while the paint
or ink dried. He would then attack each sheet a
second time, if he deemed it necessary, and walk
away. On his third visit to each sheet of paper
he would start an editing process: Keep/Finished,
Rework, or destroy. It was gratifying to see him
both breathe life into near dead pieces and, even
more satisfying, to see him shred the terminal,
beyond hope objects. Having seen the film I understood
Oldenburg's process. However, Oldenburg's completed
work showed no sign of how it had been created,
at least not the blueprint version of detailed construction
that Matisse presents us.
So, after viewing a string of Matisse's paintings
I moved on to the adjacent gallery and was confronted
by a wall of paint, bellowing to me. There I was,
standing in front of Jackson Pollock's floor to
ceiling and as wide across as three people joining
hands could reach - One: Number 31, 1950.
Bare canvas seen through skeins of paint, drizzles
of oil; laid down fifty years ago by my boyhood
idol, Jackson Pollock, king of the action painters.
Should I pick up the ghost phone? The ringing, bellowing
was unavoidable. It was spelling my name in Morse
code. Dots and dashes, no more like dots and drips.
I wasn't yet nine when I saw my first Pollock,
this was painting so unlike anything I'd seen before.
Something about the images of spattered paint grabbed
me, and this was only a shadow of reflection of
a real painting I was responding to, illustrations
in a magazine! Boy, the idea must have been familiar.
What was this kind of painting that didn't rely
upon images, but instead focused upon the action
of painting? The idea was instantly appealing.
The date of Pollock's whale of a canvas before
my eyes coincided with my own epic adventure with
a gallon of oil paint, as a three-year old. My father
was preparing to paint the front porch of our house.
He walked away, maybe to get rags or a tarp; leaving
me unsupervised with an open, full gallon bucket
of forest green paint and a four-inch wide brush
on the front porch of our house. Not that there
was any connection between my activity and Jackson
Pollock's intent, but we had both covered approximately
the same amount of horizontal surface area. There
was, in spirit, a parallel. We had each surely lost
ourselves to the act in the unconscious flow of
the event. My activity, however, would have culminated
in a spanking or murder if not for the intervention
of my grandmother. As Hans Namuth photographed Pollock
before, during, and after painting One: Number
31, 1950, my mother documented the aftermath
of my act. I was as completely green as the porch
floor.
Standing in front of the gigantic One: Number
31, 1950, I asked myself: could Pollock, like
Matisse, reveal secrets to life and art-making or
otherwise thrill me with something new on this day?
Could I discover a truth or have a lesson disclosed
to me? I answered my own question, putting Picasso,
Oldenburg, and Pollock into the same category of
"lay it down and move on" painters. The
lessons one learns from that school of painting
come from following a sequence of products, finished
paintings. That is the usual way one learns from
art. Compare one object to another and see what
can be gleaned from the comparison. That is normal.
So, here I was betting that Pollock wasn't going
to give me anything like the satisfaction of discovery
one finds when a Matisse painting strips itself
bare in front of your eyes. But, rather than leaving
it at that, I decided it would only be fair to spend
as much time in front of the Pollock as he had probably
taken to paint it, not counting the drying time,
of course. In a small way maybe I could allow myself
to be open to learning something. Maybe I should
have considered drying time. I stepped back to take
it all in. I walked up as close as I could without
attracting the guard's ire. I scanned the painting,
walking edge to edge, scrolling down and back and
forth like reading a boustrophedon.
A boustrophedon was an early solution for setting
down long written text. The name is derived from
the agricultural-based civilization context of plowing
land with an ox, turning the ox back in the other
direction at the end of a row. So, one reads right
to left, left to right, right to left, not at all
like this text is presented.
I recalled Hans Namuth's film. In it, Pollock was
working on this particular painting, the very one
in front of me. His gestures, in the film, were
also back and forth, then a layer on top of another
layer. His concentration was not limited to a portion
of the canvas, as one might be if one was placing
an object into a field. He was building the field.
As documented in the film, Pollock held a single
can/color of paint at a time. The history of color
sequence is caught both on canvas and in the black
and white film. So, I retraced, as best I could,
considering the formerly horizontal orientation
of the canvas on Pollock's studio floor, examining
layer on top of layer. I followed the lacework,
web, of color. Just so you know, I wasn't role-playing
Pollock. No one in the gallery seemed to notice,
especially since I was taking a very long time,
moving slowly. I was approaching the bottom edge.
Then without warning that row of redwood trees marched
into full view. One pink spot at a time, all completely
unexpected. What was a row of pink drips doing in
this picture? There was no pink anywhere else. These
were also drips and not dots. They had directional
tails and were the top-most layer on a canvas which
had more or less dried in a horizontal position.
The ghost telephone was ringing wildly. It was a
pink telephone, decorator pink. The color of pink
was 1950's classic pink, a color commonly used in
any American family dwelling, even in my family's
home. Pink was the color of our dining room on Pine
Grove Avenue, in 1954. My dad painted the walls
pink, I wasn't allowed near the open bucket of pink.
My mother selected the wall phone, the real, non
metaphorical, wall phone that hung in our pink dining
room. It was turquoise.
The question was, who put the pink drips there
in the Pollock, and why? Was this over splash from
someone's home decoration project? Could the spots
be seen in the Namuth film or photos? Wasn't Pollock
known to have avoided specific shapes, figures,
arrangements? Even rubbed them out? These dots may
not have been purely geometrical in arrangement,
but they were definitely a color anomaly. Was this
vandalism that had gone unnoticed? Maybe it was
a subtle hoax. Perhaps this was just unique sloppiness
caused by Pollock or someone later. I was curious.
I photographed the pink drips. This configuration
was unique in Pollock paintings, or so I believed
at the time. Was this an unintentional result of
moving a wet canvas or brush above a completed work?
It wasn't splatter from slung paint, was it? Pollock's
paint delivery was gestural and gravitational, not,
bombastic and projectile. I tried to think of accidental
accretions in art forms from Pollock's contemporaries.
Glenn Gould was famous for adding extra musical
utterances, during recording sessions, to the notes
Bach or Beethoven had written. But, here, neither
Bach nor Beethoven had a say in Mr. Gould's post
compositional vocal embellishments. Practically
speaking, the recordings show us that Glenn Gould's
vocalizations are concurrent with his piano playing.
In a sense, they are drip-like, scattered here and
there, and neither the intention of the composer
nor a conscious action of Gould. As Pollock lost
himself in the act of painting, Gould drifted along,
carried by the music he was summoning from the keyboard.
Had he added his humming accidentally to one record
while playing music for another recording, then
we would have something more akin to this situation.
Pollock's extra drips, although not commented on
by the artist, had to have been accepted by him
during his lifetime. Certainly that assumes he is
responsible for the drips or was aware of them.
He had to have made them, not mentioned them, and
simply accepted them as an unconscious byproduct
of his actions. Even Pollock's contemporary, composer
John Cage's acceptance and encouragement of indeterminacy
isn't a fit parallel. Cage went out of his way to
pursue chance operations in his music. Pollock seems
merely to have let them blend into the forest with
all the other trees, and make no comment about their
unintentional and unconsidered part in his paintings.
As I said I thought this was unique, this Jack
"the Dripper" was looking like Jack the
careless dripper. It would make sense to see evidence
of stray paint splatter, should we call it collateral
damage, or accidental additions to paintings sitting
in the studio while a fresh canvas was being attacked?
Paint flung here and there landing where it may.
Certainly if one is open to the unconscious, one
can easily accept happy accidents, even after the
fact accidents. The second supernumerary drip Pollock
I found was in Paris, at the Beaubourg. The surprise
on Number 26A, 1948: Black and White was
not a row of redwood trees, but a few globs of dimensional
red paint riding on top of Pollock's signature and
scattered in other locations. This time with certainty,
the maverick color has wandered onto a piece already
confirmed as finished by Pollock's own hand.
I am not on a crusade to locate paintings with
bonus splotches and drips, so it is entirely coincidental
that two have tumbled into view. Perhaps someone
has already inventoried and charted this inconsequential
anomaly. Because Jackson Pollock's works were so
well documented and sequence of creation easy enough
to ascertain, it is probably not necessary to take
advantage of "crime scene" evidence to
confirm exactly which paintings the drips really
belong on.
Like a bit of Art DNA, a drop of paint from one
painting found on another painting goes a long way
to confirming which came first. I suppose, going
back to that row of redwoods growing deep in the
Green Mountains of Vermont, we could tell by the
age of the trees if they'd been planted by man.
It wouldn't tell us why, however. That's not so
bad. Some mysteries, big or little, are fine left
open ended.
Note:
Art historian Marilyn Lavin introduced me to the
term and the possibility of applying the "as
the oxen plows", back and forth, format of
the boustrophedon to visual art.
I attended a lecture she gave about her frustrated
attempts to understand the sequential order of painting
arrangements in churches until she noticed they
followed one another the same way as this early
writing format worked; right to left to right to
left, etc.
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